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If the U.S spent the last year waving goodbye to Iraq in the rear-view, there certainly wasn’t much of a reckoning for the rotten and ultimately counterproductive abuse private security guards visited upon innocent Iraqis throughout the course of the seven- year war there. Nothing symbolizes this more than the New Year’s dismissal of murder [...]
I swear my heart skipped a beat when I saw this. The tentative smile of a seemingly typical 11-year-old boy — he could have been any boy in American suburbia, stopping briefly for the perfunctory photo-op in his soccer gear and trophy. But this was not normal — the caption underneath goes on to explain [...]
It shouldn’t be surprising that just a few months after hearing that the Obama Administration might not be able to fulfill its hopes for a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan due to a lack of interested/experienced American personnel, we now hear of Drug Enforcement Agency pilots being coerced — some say forcibly and illegally — [...]
Filed under: Economics, Foreign policy, Iraq, War
There was a moment when it seemed the swollen Washington crowd attending the annual meeting of the Center for a New American Security might get so pumped up by its own mission of salvation for the broader Middle East and Central Asia that it could take off like a rocket ship of its own self-satisfaction [...]
Filed under: Iraq, Uncategorized, War
For all of you keeping score at home, Neocon Central has now decided that being a Wilsonian is a bad thing. When they were running the show at 1600 Penn, global democracy was a noble and necessary pursuit. Those who questioned its plausibility were defeatists—unpatriotic ingrowns refusing to acknowledge America’s exceptional status.
But at the first [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Iraq
I had always revered Rolling Thunder — the romantic vision of a Band of Brothers, refugees from a South Asian hellhole whose common experience, really, was the only thing separating them from a certain reckless breed of motorcycle gang. Their annual sojourn to the National Mall for Memorial Day, emblazoned in leather with the simple [...]
Filed under: Iraq, Politics, Uncategorized, War
That Doug Feith, eh? You almost have to admire his chutzpah. Having played such a large part in completely wrecking Iraq, he has an article in today’s Wall Street Journal laying out his new plan for world Utopia.
The big idea is the aggrandizement of the Civilian Response Corps “so the president can mobilize trained [...]
Filed under: Iraq, Uncategorized, War
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a brave and impressive woman. Yet she’s also a crashing bore and a bully. Here she is today, fulminating again against feeble Europe for not standing up to the Islamic menace.
Most of the article is, as you might expect, standard beware-the-Muslim-in-your-midst stuff. We should loathe multi-culturalism and remember that Islam is [...]
Filed under: Iraq, Uncategorized, War
Nearly a year ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced that eliminating the stigma of mental health from the military culture would be a Pentagon priority. Seeing that some one-third of soldiers returning from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are reporting mental health symptoms, particularly those associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), hearing him [...]
President Obama’s unscheduled stop in Iraq yesterday not only put Iraq back above the fold, but found reporters and analysts rushing to creatively package it. A popular theme to emerge is that Obama’s brief surprise visit, featuring a speech to U.S troops at Camp Victory outside the airport (sandstorms reportedly prevented him from traveling to [...]